MWC 2013: Asus Padfone Infinity hands-on preview

by2/27/2013 8:19:49 AM

2/27/2013 8:19:49 AM

Asus’ new Padfone Infinity is its latest smartphone which comes with a unique tablet dock – slide the Padfone into the slot on the back of the tablet, and whatever you’re doing flashes up on the 10.1-inch screen, giving you a larger working area.

Starting with the phone part, it’s rocking a sleek aerospace-grade aluminium alloy unibody frame which is a sleek silver colour. It’s a massive step up in our opinion from the plain plastic finish of the Padfone 2, which seemed a little too stuffy and business-like. It’s impressively solid and feels good in the hand, sporting a relatively svelte body considering the five-inch screen. The Padfone Infinity is a little chunky compared to rivals such as the LG Optimus Pro G, but it doesn’t weigh you down.

The Padfone Infinity’s beautiful display boasts a Full HD 1920 x 1080p resolution, giving a 441ppi density – that’s well above the Apple iPhone 5’s Retina display and most other rivals, and certainly the photos we checked out looked fantastic. We stared hard but couldn’t see individual pixels. Viewing angles are excellent and colours appear to be realistically reproduced.

You get a Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 quad-core processor packed inside the Padfone Infinity, backed up by 2GB of RAM, so no matter what you want to do – run intensive business apps or have a blast on the latest games – the Padfone Infinity should cope with it all. You also get a whopping 64GB of built-in storage (as well as 50GB of Asus web storage).

The Padfone Infinity slides effortlessly into the Padfone Station tablet dock, and sticks in place so it won’t take a tumble if you turn the Station upside down. There’s still a slight bump in the middle when you slot the phone in, so the tablet doesn’t sit flush on a table top – jabbing the edges of the screen causes it to wobble, so you’re better off holding it or sitting it in your lap to keep it steady during use.

The 13MP camera was difficult to test out in the booth, but the f2.0 aperture lens does seem to suck in a decent amount of light for shots in dingy pubs etc. The burst mode is very impressive, capturing eight photos a second for as long as you hold the shutter button, or until you hit a hundred. You can then choose which ones to save and which can be scrapped, so your 64GB of storage doesn’t get wiped out. The Asus booth was pretty noisy, so we didn’t test the ability to take photos by saying ‘cheese’ – check out our full review to see how that one pans out.

The Asus Padfone Infinity should hit stores in April and combined with the Padfone Station it will set you back 999 Euros. That’s a big chunk of change, so we’re hoping the Padfone Infinity delivers on its promises.